『Sustainability In Your Ear』のカバーアート

Sustainability In Your Ear

Sustainability In Your Ear

著者： Mitch Ratcliffe
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概要

 Mitch Ratcliffe interviews activists, authors, entrepreneurs and changemakers working to accelerate the transition to a sustainable, post-carbon society. You have more power to improve the world than you know! Listen in to learn and be inspired to give your best to restoring the climate and regenerating nature.Copyright 2025 Internet Media Strategies Inc. マネジメント・リーダーシップ リーダーシップ 地球科学 生物科学 科学 経済学
エピソード
  • Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging

    Emerald Packaging CEO Kevin Kelly Delivers Recycled Produce Packaging
    2026/05/11
    Americans throw away nearly 5 million tons of film and flexible plastic packaging every year, and less than 1% of it gets recycled, according to The Recycling Partnership. The salad bag, the potato bag, the pallet wrap behind every grocery store — all of it is technically recyclable, almost none of it actually is, and food contact applications make the math even harder, because the FDA requires rigorous migration testing before a single recycled pellet can touch what we eat. Kevin Kelly, CEO of Emerald Packaging, the largest supplier of retail flexible packaging to the U.S. produce industry, has spent decades on that problem from inside the industry. In December 2025, his Union City, California–based, third-generation family business announced that it had eliminated more than 1 million pounds of virgin polyethylene over the previous year by replacing it with post-consumer recycled (PCR) material, including, in partnership with Walmart, Idaho Package, and Wada Farms, the first 30% PCR potato bag approved for direct food contact. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Kevin walks through what it actually took to get that bag on a Walmart shelf, why most flexible packaging companies still won't try, and why the most ambitious recycling law in the country may push the industry in the wrong direction.[

    Food-grade PCR is a different animal from the recycled plastic in a milk crate or a contractor bag. To pass FDA scrutiny, the feedstock has to be traceable from a known, food-adjacent source. For Emerald, that mostly means pallet wrap collected from Walmart distribution centers, washed, dried, and repelletized by suppliers like Dow Chemical's Circulus mechanical recycling business and Canada's Nova Chemicals. Variation in any given load of recyclable plastic causes carbon buildup on Emerald's extrusion lines, forcing a shutdown every eight hours for cleaning, and waste rates are higher than with virgin resin. The company has had to audit its own suppliers in person, push back on competitors who hide non-food-grade PCR in the middle layer of multilayer films and call it sustainable, and walk produce buyers through what “food-grade” actually means before they sign on. Kevin describes Emerald as “the canary in the coal mine” for food-grade PCR — he can't find another bag in the store that's labeled the same way.

    The harder argument Kevin makes is about policy. California's SB 54, the most ambitious extended producer responsibility (EPR) law in the country, with a 65% recycling rate target and a 25% source reduction mandate by 2032, was supposed to drive exactly the kind of work Emerald is doing. But Kevin says the rulemaking went the other way. The pound-for-pound PCR credit that would have rewarded companies for replacing virgin resin with recycled content was stripped out, and the fees are low enough that producers can hit early reduction targets through agricultural film and other low-hanging fruit without ever switching to food-grade PCR. The deeper structural problem Kevin lays out is the capital story. Family-owned manufacturers freed from quarterly returns pressure, Kevin argues, are doing more to push food-grade PCR forward today than the capital pools that are theoretically supposed to fund the energy and sustainability transition.To find out more about Emerald Packaging, visit empack.com.
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    46 分
  • Sustainability In Your Ear: Zena Harris Brings a Green Spark to Hollywood

    Sustainability In Your Ear: Zena Harris Brings a Green Spark to Hollywood
    2026/04/27
    An average big-budget movie creates about 3,370 metric tons of CO₂, according to the Sustainable Production Alliance's 2021 report. That’s like driving over 700 gas-powered cars for a year, or about 33 metric tons of CO₂ for each day of filming. A single TV season can have the same impact as 108 cars. With thousands of productions happening every year in North America, Hollywood’s environmental impact is hard to overlook. Zena Harris, founder and president of Green Spark Group, has spent more than ten years helping the industry turn sustainability goals into practical steps that productions can track. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, she shares how to build sustainable practices into film and TV projects from the very start, instead of adding them at the end when most waste has already been created. Zena started Green Spark Group in 2014 after earning a master’s in sustainability and environmental management at Harvard. She pitched Vancouver’s major studios on a simple idea: sustainability can save money. Her first big project, the X-Files reboot, managed to divert 81% of its waste across 40 filming locations. Since then, her certified B Corp consultancy has worked with Disney, NBCUniversal, Amazon, and other major studios, and she founded the Sustainable Production Forum, which is now in its tenth year. This conversation comes at an important time. Soon, California’s climate disclosure laws will require studios to report emissions from every vendor in their production supply chain, both before and after filming. Zena points out that while studios are getting ready, most of their suppliers—like small companies that rent generators, handle waste, or provide lumber on tight schedules—are not prepared. The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance has released Scope 3 guidance for productions, and updated Scope 1 and 2 guidance came out in August 2025, but there is still no single tool that everyone uses. The real challenge over the next two years will be closing the gap between what studios must report and what their suppliers can provide. Zena also makes a bigger point about culture. After 12 years in the industry, she sees sustainability experts facing the same obstacles again and again because the way content is made hasn’t changed. The day-to-day work is important, but the bigger opportunity is in climate storytelling. Only about 13% of recent top-rated films mention climate change at all. Tracking the carbon footprint of a TV season is important, but what really matters is how a billion viewers see what’s normal on screen. That’s the influence Hollywood hasn’t fully used yet.To follow Zena’s work, visit greensparkgroup.com. You can also learn more about the conference she started at sustainableproductionforum.com, or listen to her podcast, The Tie-In, which she co-hosts with Mark Rabin.Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunesFollow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
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    46 分
  • Author Michael Maniates on Why Green Shopping Isn't Enough

    Author Michael Maniates on Why Green Shopping Isn't Enough
    2026/04/13
    In 2024, the global market for eco-labeled products crossed $500 billion. Electric vehicles, bamboo toothbrushes, compostable packaging — the shelves are full of ways to shop your way to a better planet. And yet global carbon emissions hit another record high that same year, and atmospheric CO₂ now stands above 429 parts per million. Decades of research have produced a finding that the sustainability industry doesn't want to talk about: buying green products doesn't drive the systemic change we need. It might not even be moving the needle. That's the core argument of Michael Maniates, an environmental social scientist and author of The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism. Michael has spent more than 30 years studying why well-intentioned environmental choices at the checkout line fail to add up to real-world emissions reductions, and what kinds of action actually do. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, he makes the case that the most powerful thing an eco-conscious person can do isn't swap their products. It's to become an active citizen.

    The resulting cycle has a name in Michael's framework: the trinity of despair. Earnest effort. Negligible impact. Creeping anxiety that we can't turn the corner. People try hard, see little result, feel guilty when they can't maintain perfection, and eventually burn out — or conclude that meaningful change requires getting every single person on board first. He is a sharp critic of what sociologist Elizabeth Shove has called the ABC model of social change: shift Attitudes, change Behavior, and better Choices will follow. It's the backbone of most sustainability communications — and, he argues, it's empirically fragile. Pro-environmental attitudes don't reliably produce pro-environmental behavior. Yet the model persists in education, marketing, and environmental organizing alike. Why does it keep coming back? Maniates identifies two reasons. First, it's deeply embedded in the educational system. Second, it sanitizes a genuinely gnarly problem of power and politics into a communication challenge: if we just get more information out there, people will make better choices. That framing shifts blame onto consumers, hides the structural drivers of high-carbon living, and makes life easier for politicians who don't want to touch the structural stuff.

    Find Michael Maniates' work, including his email to ask your direct questions, at michaelmaniates.com. His book, Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life Within Sustainable Limits is available as a free download. The Living Green Myth: The Promise and Limits of Lifestyle Environmentalism was published in November 2025 by Polity Press.
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